


The Art of Losing

by livin_in_my_head_2



Category: The Sims (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 10:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17262674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livin_in_my_head_2/pseuds/livin_in_my_head_2
Summary: When Meredith Simmons wakes up in her favorite video game, The Sims 4, she discovers a complex world behind the small playable people on her computer screen. They hate the god-like presence in their lives, the one that forces them to marry and raise families with people they don't love.And they don't know that this new girl is that same presence.As Meredith tries to figure out how she came to be in the video game, she struggles with keeping her identity a secret, especially as it becomes clear that someone else has taken over her SIms game.Someone sinister.





	1. Chapter 1

Hello! I wanted to give a quick author's note before the actual story.

First of all, thank you for clicking on this story! The premise is a little strange, but here's my inspiration:

I've loved playing the Sims ever since I got my first iPod (I know - whoah) and downloaded "The Sims Freeplay." I've always loved it, but enjoyed daydreaming about the possibility that the little people in my computer were real - and fully aware they were being controlled. I found a few stories sort of involving this on Wattpad, but they were all written ages ago and rather poorly.

I wanted to take this concept and run with it, exploring the relationships the Sims might have covertly made, how exactly their world runs from their perspective, and their feelings towards their creator and controller. So if this reads more like a dramatic novel than a fanfiction, great! I'm doing something right :)

Updates are going to be slow and based on reader interaction. The more interest people show in the book, the more I'll write it! I'll try to update at least once a week but I am a high school student with multiple extracurriculars so life can get a little crazy! You'll have to excuse me if I happen to miss a week or if a chapter isn't up to usual standards - I'm trying my best!

(Quick side note: this will be based off the objects and gameplay of the Sims 4 - base game only, no mods. For simplicity's sake.)

Okay, that's all from me! Leave a comment if you enjoy the story :)


	2. 1- Awakening

Meredith had had her fair share of confusing wake-ups.

When she was five, her parents had surprised her with a puppy by dumping the creature on her chest while she was still asleep. Waking up to such a shock wasn't a great idea for a young child, and Meredith had promptly burst into tears. It had taken her a week to feel comfortable around the well-meaning pooch.

Then there was when she was eight and had woken up buckled into the backseat of her dad's car, rumbling softly down the highway, when she distinctly remembered falling asleep in her bed. Turned out that they hadn't wanted to wake her for their early morning flight to Disneyworld - which she had also not been aware of whatsoever. Her parents really, _really_ liked surprising her.

Finally, there was when she was eleven and had sleepwalked into her parents' bedroom before passing out on the floor. She had woken up with a crick in her neck and an ache in her back, but other than that, she was fine.

But this - this was something completely different.

Meredith awoke in a small, grey room. This wasn't her bed plus a puppy or her father's car or her parents' bedroom floor. She had never seen this room before in her life.

It was plain, with four walls painted the exact same shade of boredom and two doors, one on either side of the room. The bed that Meredith was resting on top of - not tucked into the sheets, but laying atop them - was small and hard, overall insanely uncomfortable.

She sat up carefully, as if she had sustained head trauma. Maybe she had. Maybe she was still dreaming. After all, things looked...different. Like her life had become a different resolution. Everything looked slightly pixelated but somehow highly familiar. She looked down at the bedsheets of the bed.

A blocky green frame...a blue comforter adorned with a white star...

The recognition was instant. She distinctly remembered buying this bed. But not in real life...

No, she had purchased this bed for one of her Sims in her favorite video game. This bed belonged in the Sims 4, and yet here Meredith was, sitting on it.

She leapt to her feet as if it had pinched her and backed up until her back hit the opposite wall.  _Calm down_ , she told herself, ignoring her frantically beating heart.  _So somebody made a bed just like the one from the Sims. No big deal_.

 _But what is a big deal is that whoever made the bed has me_ sleeping on it!

Stories began to fill her head, both fictional and factual, of children stolen away in the night, locked up by some lunatic. Perhaps some video-game obsessed lunatic with an affinity for the Sims. But no. That was crazy, completely crazy. Meredith's family wasn't rich. They weren't important or famous. Her father was a schoolteacher and her mother was an accountant - what motivation could there  _possibly_ be for kidnapping their daughter?

Meredith began to recall all the other times she had woken up in deep confusion and realized they had all been a direct result of her parents. Surely this was one of them. Although custom building an entire bed seemed extreme for one of their surprises...but it wouldn't surprise her. Her parents already had the crazy - all they needed was the cash to be labeled "eccentric." And maybe they had found it. Maybe this was their way of telling her that they had won the lottery or something.

Her head was beginning to hurt in that way that it did whenever anything just  _didn't make sense_. When she couldn't figure out what a shadowy shape was or could feel herself on the brink of solving a difficult math problem. Only this...this was worse. In those instances, at least the world had  _looked_ right. Everything looked  _wrong_ here, and she had no idea how her parents were doing it.

One of the doors opened and her confusion quickly turned into fear as her brain returned to the kidnapping possibility. She swung around to face whoever was entering and was met with the bored, indifferent face of a boy around her age.

"Oh, great, another newcomer," he muttered to himself. Then he raised his voice, speaking directly to her. "Name, age group, town."

She stared at him, brow furrowing.

"Name, age group, town!"

"Uh, Meredith, 16, Chicago?"

The boy sighed and looked toward the ceiling. "I swear, they're cooking up dumber and dumber ones each time," he muttered.

"Excuse me?"

"Okay, Meredith, you said? 16 is not an age group and I don't even know what the hell Chicago is. So why don't we try this one last time? Name, age group, town?"

"I don't know what you want from me," Meredith whispered, tears pricking at her eyes. It was a characteristic of hers that she hated - whenever she was overwhelmed or emotional, the waterworks began. She had no hope of controlling them here.

"Wow, you're really lost, aren't you?" The boy took a long look at her before sighing and placing a hand on his chest. "Okay. I'll show you what to say. Devon, teen, Brindleton Bay. Got it?"

"Brindleton Bay? Like the town in the Sims?"

"In the what?"

"The video game, the Sims. There are a bunch of towns, one of them's Brindleton Bay."

"Wait, Sims Forever? That's not one of the towns."

"I don't know what's going on!" Meredith nearly shouted in confusion. "Why does that bed in there look like it's from the Sims? And no, not Sims Forever - I've never played that game! I mean the Sims 4. Did my parents put you up to this?"

"Oh, you have parents? You're better formed than most of us." Devon took another long look at her. "Okay, I'm getting the sense that something is off..."

"Yeah, no shit!"

"What exactly is strange about this place to you?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that I fell asleep in my bed and woke up here! Did you guys kidnap me or something? And why do you have a bed from a  _video game_ in that room? Where am I and where are my parents?"

"You're in Willow Creek. You just spawned in."

"Willow Creek...Devon, are you trying to tell me that I'm  _in_ a video game?" She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrow.

"Why would you think that?"

"Because Willow Creek and Brindleton Bay are two towns in the video game 'The Sims 4!' And that bed is only available in the game, and this whole  _place_ has the graphics of the video game!"

Devon's face was beginning to lose its color. "What are the other towns in this game of yours?"

"Oasis Springs, Forgotten Hollow, Magnolia Prominade, Newcrest, to name a few." Meredith had felt confident at the beginning of her list, but the confidence began to slow as Devon looked sick to his stomach.

"And how do you play this game? The Sims?" he asked, "Sims" sounding like a bad word coming from him.

"You control a bunch of virtual people. You make them build lives, get married, have kids, that sort of thing."

"Oh no," Devon breathed. Without warning, he grabbed her arm and propelled her out of the room, into a hallway painted the exact same drab grey color.

"Wait, where are we going?" Meredith demanded. "What's going on?"

"You're one of them," he snarled. "One of the bastards who controls our lives."

Okay, she was sure that, if her parents had been involved in this drastic set-up, they wouldn't have included  _this_. They wouldn't have dropped the puppy on her chest if they had thought it would scare her, just like they would never put together a LARPing activity like this one that involved any animosity directed toward her. Meredith felt stress knotting in her stomach, clouding her judgement. But she didn't try to get away from Devon. She had no idea where she was or who else was here. Running would get her nowhere.

They turned down hallway after hallway until Meredith was dizzy and disoriented. This was by far the rudest awakening she had ever had.

Finally, Devon pushed open one of the many doors they had passed and shoved her inside, following close behind.

The room was an ornate study, the walls lined with fancy bookshelves and a large desk taking up one side of the room. A fireplace crackled and Meredith instantly began to sweat from the suffocating heat.

Behind the desk was seated an elderly woman, her hair pulled back into a severe bun and the lines on her face deep and pronounced. Only...there wasn't very much detail to her aside from a few nods to her age around her eyes and on her forehead. Other than that, her features were smooth, and her clothes moved in strange ways as she looked up at the teenagers interrupting her work.

"Devon? What is it?" she asked.

"This girl - she's one of them!"

"One of whom, Devon? You know how much I hate it when you're vague."

"One of  _them!_ The ones who control us! The Overseers!"

The woman rose in an instant, faster than Meredith would have thought she could move. She rounded the desk and stalked over to Meredith, grabbing her chin in her bony hand and examining it closely. "She looks normal to me," she said to Devon, still staring at Meredith.

"She did to me, too. But she knows all the towns by name and recognized the bed she was on! She says...you tell her." He nudged Meredith contemptuously and she cleared her throat nervously.

"Okay, I have no idea what's going on and who you people are, for the record. And you've probably kidnapped me, so I think I'm deep in shock and denial right now," she added, "but...all of this, all this furniture and the way things  _look_ and the towns...they're all in a video game called the Sims 4. In the game you control virtual people and their lives."

"Can you force them to get married?"

Meredith nodded.

"Can you make them have children with whomever you please?"

"Pretty much."

"Oh no," the old woman whispered, mirroring Devon's words from earlier. She stepped back from Meredith as if she were a poisonous parasite. "You  _are_ one of them."

"One of whom?"

"One of the Overseers! The people who ruin our lives for their own sick enjoyment!" The woman hobbled forward again and jabbed an accusatory finger in Meredith's face. "You're a monster!"

"No, ma'am,  _I_ don't play the game," Meredith hear herself blurt out.

The woman paused. "Wait. In your world...not  _everyone_ is an Overseer?"

"If you mean not everyone plays the Sims, then yeah. There are tons of people who don't like the game."

"So you're not completely devoid of morality, then. You've never played the Sims?"

Meredith shook her head hurriedly. She had heard the hatred in both of their voices - the last thing she needed was violence or an attack of some sort, especially when she had no idea what was happening.

Well, she had  _some_ idea, but there was no way she was ready to admit that to herself or even entertain the notion.

"Then how do you know so much about it?" Devon demanded.

Meredith thought quickly. "My sister plays it. She has for years. It's all she'll ever talk about. I've picked up a few things."

"So your sister's an Overseer and you aren't. Curious." The old woman returned to her desk, settling into the seat behind it with a sigh. "Sit down, dear. What we're about to tell you will be a shock."


End file.
